GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (40 page)

Seymour takes a few steps forward and
finds himself once again at the corner of the
Rue du Regard
as at the first trial run, but
everything steady and sharply focused,
blue sky and friendly sunshine this
time.

Even so, a born worrier to the day of his
death and resurrected that way, Seymour advances cautiously,
fearing that at any moment those buildings will start buckling, the
sun blow-torch him, the shade deep-freeze him, the peaceful
mackerels in the fish shop loom at him like sharks, jaws agape. So
he stares down at the sidewalk. There’s no
marelle
scrawled on it, a positive point, but he’s
prepared for the sidewalk to fissure and swallow him up.

Buildings, sun, fish and sidewalk behave
normally. Seymour walks on until the golden horse head registers in
the corner of his eye. He halts and turns, facing the
porte-cochere
.
He advances his finger slowly and presses the button. The door
clicks free. “Yes, I know what will happen now,” he says out loud
as he reaches out, expecting to be snatched back to starting point,
the way it had happened the first time out.

It doesn’t happen this time. He’s able to
push the door wide open. He steps over the metal threshold into the
courtyard of her building, finally, after all that time.

Helen props herself up painfully in the
double bed in the big hotel room with light blue walls and pictures
of soaring birds. At the same moment that she notices the imprint
of a head in the pillow next to hers, she hears, thinks she hears,
in meaningful English, “Helen! Helen!” but maybe, in meaningless
French, “
Hélène! Hélène!
”
the young man’s voice muffled by the closed window and drawn
drapes. She resists for as long as she can and finally gets up and
goes over to the window, noticing only then that she’s naked and
strangely feeble and aching in every joint.

She struggles with the drapes and pulls
the window open on opaque white fog. There’s no sound for a minute.
Then the young man’s voice floats up from the invisible street
below, repeating either “Helen” or calling to some unknown wrong
“
Hélène
” and in
that case the young man is also unknown and wrong. Now
unintelligible words come to her: English or French? She chooses it
to be English and thinks: he wants the wallet, but I won’t throw it
down and have him vanish again. “Come back up!” she cries, but the
fog distorts her voice to a squeak.

She hobbles painfully into the familiar big
blue-tiled bathroom. On one side of the washbasin lies a
rectangular object twisted and crevassed with age and next to it,
two balls of fuzzy white mold. Just as she perceives her image in
the mirror, her hair white like the decayed spat-out pills and her
appalled face, twisted and crevassed with age like his wallet, she
hears booming feet, taking the steps three by three, tireless,
flight after flight.

He’s reached her corridor. Helen totters out
of the bathroom and looks about but can’t locate clothing to cover
her decrepit nudity, can’t locate the key to lock the door against
his vision of it. Hearing his approaching footsteps, she pushes
against the table to barricade the door. She hasn’t the strength.
She drags a chair over and clumsily jams it beneath the
doorknob.

The footsteps have stopped. He must be
standing in front of the door, reaching for the doorknob. The
flimsy chair won’t keep him out. She huddles in the corner close to
the open window.

“
I’m
Hélène
, not
Helen,” she tries to cry in French. “You have the wrong room.” Her
cry is an inaudible squeak.

She thinks she can see the doorknob
turning.

Three right turns and now Louis trudges
straight on, as instructed, in search of something vital he can’t
remember. By this time, the accelerating spin of his mind has flung
out one by one almost all the elements of his original quest. He’s
lost the river, the bridge, the church spire, the Embassy, and what
all of these secondary things lead up to, the flower shop and his
darling. All he has left is the yearning to find a sloping street
and run down it toward obscure but tremendous joy.

But the street he’s been enjoined to follow
(who by and why?: now he loses that too) gradually starts rising,
keeps on rising through neighborhoods of growing squalor and
stench, taking him away from that mysterious happiness that clearly
lies in the opposite direction.

Louis lets himself down on a bench and waits
for the dizziness to stop and for memory to seep back. Instead, the
whirl accelerates and he loses more things: what this foreign city
is and what he’s doing in it and finally who he is. All he has left
is the knowledge that joy lies in the opposite direction, in a
neighborhood of calm elegance. This street with its
garbage-cluttered gutters and disjointed paving stones can’t
possibly lead to it.

Still, he gets up and resumes the imposed
path past decaying tenements and disused sooty factories with tall
brick chimneys and smashed windows, confused by the din of hammers
on metal, the clopping of hooves, the thunder of great barrels
rolling down cobble-stoned alleyways. He passes dumping grounds
with rag pickers’ hovels and picketed goats browsing rare grass
among broken bricks and bottles. Now heavily mustached hip-booted
men poking and raking knee-deep in a narrow shallow stinking canal
which Louis can’t know is actually a river, the
Bièvre
, subterranean for most of its course through
Paris
.

In a sordid courtyard a bearded old man in a bowler
hat is cranking out wheezing sour music from a hurdy-gurdy. Next to
him a tiny ragged woman sings raucously, of love it must be,
because she clutches the area of her heart regularly with an
ecstatic gap-toothed smile.

Louis goes past them and encounters a
pockmarked old woman with wild waist-long white hair. In the crook
of her arm lie withered flowers she must have salvaged from a
nearby garbage heap.

“
Des
fleurs, des fleurs, Monsieur, Achetez-moi mes belles
fleurs
!”

At the sight of those flowers, with the love lament
going on behind him, it all comes back to him; the slope to the
river, the bridge, the view from it of the spire of the right
church, the way from the church to the Embassy, the way from the
Embassy to the street with fresh flowers in the windows and his
sweetheart inside. All of that lies downhill in the opposite
direction. The irascible old man could only have purposely
misguided him.

He leaves the street, turning down a sloping
alleyway.

Then, turning a corner, miraculously, no
need for the river, the bridge, the church, the Embassy, there it
is, calm and elegant: Louise’s street.

Finally, after all that time, Seymour
stands in the courtyard with an unfamiliar gray cat staring at the
armless blank-eyed Roman goddess in the shop with the sign
Moulage
d’Art,
and the bikes
leaning against the scaly walls between the picture framer’s and
the plumber’s and a bronze-caster.

Bronze-caster? Seymour doesn’t remember a
bronze-caster in that 1951 courtyard. And where is her father’s
tailor-shop? Isn’t the bronze-caster where the tailor shop had
been? He crosses the courtyard, careful not to trip over the
disjointed paving stones. That hasn’t changed.

The concierge’s lodge is familiar too. The
hinged door opens, though, on an unfamiliar face. Where is
Madame
Maurice, the shapeless old
concierge? This one is middle-aged and skinny with a
snapping-turtle mouth, washed-out blue eyes and sharp cheekbones.
She has a feather duster in her hand.

“
Vous cherchez
?” she says, professionally suspicious
like all Parisian concierges. She looks blank when he says: “Mr and
Mrs Laurier.” He has to spell the name. She says there’s no Laurier
here, he must have the wrong building. She begins to close the
hinged door. No, he says and gives her the number: Seventy-one. The
wrong street then, she retorts. He gives her that too: “Number
Seventy-one
Rue du Regard.
”
Snappish:
“I’ve been
here thirty years and there’s never been anybody named Laurier in
this building.”

The wrong concierge closes the little hinged
window. Back turned to him, she starts dusting an unfamiliar
bouquet of plastic flowers.

Seymour sneaks past and spirals up the
gloomy cabbage-smelling staircase to the fourth floor and the
familiar dark varnished door. He knocks and waits. Knocks and waits
and finally tries the knob and pushes the door open and enters the
gloom of the empty apartment.

Not a stick of furniture. Not even a single
lightbulb. The gilt-framed mirror over the mantelpiece is gone, a
memory of it in the form of a pale square on the dingy wall. The
floor creaks as he advances in dimness from room to room. In her
bedroom the slats of the closed shutters censor sunshine to faint
lines on the dusty floor.

Seymour returns to the living room. He
tugs at the window, shoves the shutters open and looks down at the
courtyard with the bronze-caster that usurps the place of her
father’s tailor shop. From the window across the way, an
out-of-tune piano accompanies a sour contralto.
He recognizes Beethoven’s
An die ferne
Geliebte
.

To the Distant Beloved.

At that corny ironic stage trick Seymour
revolts against the role he’s been forced to play in this
third-rate theatre of cruelty and the absurd, the unimaginative
expressionistic setting of the dusty empty apartment, not to
mention all of the rest of it in the Prefecture: those endless
corridors and the sadistic tunnel, the tantalizing year wheeling
about endlessly in the window.

In a Beethovenesque gesture of defiance
(equally corny), Seymour leans perilously out of the fourth-story
window and shakes his fist at the sky, at the cruel, absurd and
absolutely untalented Author/Producer/Director/Set-Designer and
shouts: “Goddam you! Give me Marie-Claude, goddam you!”

With that unprecedented gesture and cry of
defiance, it all collapses, as though he’d smashed the flimsy stage
setting to bits.

The piano breaks off on a corny dissonant
chord.

The spotlight sun fades.

The street setting fades.

An die ferne
Geliebte
, never so
distant, never so beloved, fades.

In atrocious pain, Seymour Stein starts fading
too.

What’s left of him before the open window
realizes that this isn’t another time-transfer but total
extinction. He clutches at the idea that his imminent void is
somehow connected with the void of the apartment and that if he can
fill that void behind he’ll stave off the void ahead.

He squeezes his eyes shut and combats
extinction with a rage of memory.

He remembers the gilt-framed mantelpiece
mirror, down to the very patterns of the tarnish. Remembers the
black marble mantelpiece beneath the mirror with the perfectly
centered bronze lion dying nobly and on each side of the lion the
late 19th century family photographs and remembers those stark
unsmiling ancestral faces, all of them, and there, yes, his
sweetheart at eleven, veiled in Confirmation white like a tiny
prepubescent bride.

Behind his closed lids, he goes on
abolishing the void, his own and the room’s.

He remembers the massive cherry-wood table
set for dinner with his chair and his personal napkin in the wooden
ring and above the table the complicated oak chandelier with three
thrifty low-watt candle-shaped bulbs with artificial wax-drops on
the white holders.

Remembers the cylindrical waist-high stove
with the pipe running into the lowered iron curtain of the
fireplace and alongside it the metal tray with old newspapers and
kindling wood and the battered coal-pail.

Remembers the pattern of the lace on the
windows and the faded wallpaper repeating a shepherd blowing into a
flute beneath a weeping willow.

Remembers her father’s oil paintings massed
on a wall from floor to ceiling. In stupefying total recall,
standing before the window, eyes shut, he summons up every one of
those uninspired rural scenes.

The task of mental resurrection completed,
Seymour Stein opens his eyes.

The windowpanes, minutes ago starkly blank,
are now covered with lace, the familiar pattern. To make sure it’s
real he touches it. Through that real lace he stares at the
courtyard below and sees her father’s tailor shop where the
imposter bronze-caster’s workshop had stood. The cat, no longer
gray but correctly black, is sitting before it.

In his joy, Seymour relaxes his tremendous
mental effort. The courtyard goes glaring blank like a movie screen
with the film broken in the projector. He feels that he’ll go blank
too unless he counterattacks with memory again. He does. The
courtyard returns after what seems like a second of absence. But
outside time isn’t inside time because the black cat is gone and
one of the bikes too and shadows have shifted.

The lace is back on the windowpanes so the
rest of the apartment must be back too. Seymour turns around and
yes, the 1951 apartment is there, maybe fewer paintings on the wall
and the photo of his little darling gone from the mantelpiece and
the wall-paper brighter, but otherwise practically identical to his
memory of it.

He hears a key turning in a lock and the
front door opening and closing. Soft footsteps in the corridor
approach the living room.